Lilith
by lifeundecided
Summary: She's his wicked woman who'll never be.


_Author's note: I am sorry for neglecting to update my other stories, but I did my last exam yesterday (the serious ones that determine whether I get offered a place at my preferred university, so take pity). The minuscule bit of French I included sounds prettier to my ears than the English equivalent, and if Tate writing TAINT on the chalkboard and his knowledge of poetry is anything to go by, I think he'd prefer it too._

He is doomed to love the parts of her she hates the most, the scabs she picks at and lets fester out of equal parts impatience and curiosity. That part of her that peeks out from wide eyes and rips through her skin in razor blade lines to make itself seen, that guided her hand to the bottle of pills when, in actuality, she knew the weight of the cap in her hand and the poison on her tongue, too much going down and not enough coming up.

He lets her pretend because he is sure he loves her and the because the house is cold without her hands on his skin. She pretends to let him take what he wants because it's what he wants and she's weak. He fucks her against walls and grazes her skin and lets her whimper so he can pay her back with the bland and mediocre kind of vanilla she should want; he whispers poetic declarations of love against her neck and she stays silent. He knows that when her eyes glaze over she's repeating her black mantra of dirty words and R rated movie scenes, not looking into his eyes like she used to. She hides the horror movies under her bed like she used to hide her other contraband. He doesn't call her out on it this time because it would ruin her fun.

She wears cardigans with white ankle socks and it's painful to watch her try so hard to be a good little girl. She goes about it clumsily and she's become plain Lo in socks and Lolita in his arms and he's running around trying desperately to make her stay and play pretend because he knows nobody else in this house is that good an actor.

He tells her what he'll do with his big dick and cringes when she tries very hard to make herself blush. She looks bored at best and she hides her face in the pillow: it's not embarrassment but denial of the fact that he's not such a bad boy to her anymore.

Shaking and collapsing and apologising like he hadn't strung it out as far as possible, he promises Scrabble and doesn't ask what he can do to get her off. He knows and she knows and she'll play coy until her hair's wrapped around his wrist and she's screaming his name because he knows how to make it hurt and how to make her writhe in pain in that certain way that will leave her clit raw and swollen completely by accident.

Victory is victory for the good and the bad of the world alike.

He'll mutter something about getting even, getting off, her eyes will widen and it's comical and sad and he kisses her to wipe the little cartoon O shape off her mouth. He'll nip her skin and rip off her dress up doll clothes and ask why she wasn't wearing panties. She'll frown because he's not supposed to know she was waiting for this moment and he'll trace her shoulder blades and bend her over and make her moan and feel like he did something right for once.

Strawberries serve as a wedding breakfast post coitus and sometimes she'll bring bleach to get rid of the blood but more often than not she'll make him drink it. His vomit smells like soap or cheap lip gloss because he'll only ever eat when she pushes fruit into his hands.

When he wakes up she's either in the gazebo or in between his legs where a good girl like her should not be and the other girl behind her eyes is back for round two since she's insatiable.

He's not sure who she is anymore, but he's not complaining. It's like a threesome with two bodies and two minds: one plus a half plus a half. She's giving it her all but she's still inexperienced and too stubborn to listen to teacher. Even then a mouth is a mouth and a tongue is a tongue and it's Violet so he cums and makes her grin a pixie grin. He wonders if he should leave out milk with sugar; her little bones will shrink even more until she could live among the flowers in the garden, wear a purple dress because she's Violet, after all.

She leaves him sticky and cold, and he starts to count the days until she'll show up at his side with sharp fingers and a stale mouth that shapes his name and little else, has done for years.

Some of them practice for Halloween all year round and it seems to him that some of the ghosts' knowledge of the supernatural is purely harvested from kids' movies. Chad's a sweet transvestite and he's got the legs and the artistic curve of blood red lipstick but not the height, so it looks a little less impressive than he had hoped. Tate thinks he must have used a shoe horn and possibly a fireplace poker to get Patrick into the little gold shorts that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination and of all the things in the world make him uncomfortable.

He can see a lot more than the suggestion of a dick and it's got his mind ticking over and he's shocked to admit that Patrick deserves a pat on the back and wonders how on earth Chad ever got him tied down in the first place. Love is strange and he thinks that maybe Ben was right and he doesn't know how to do it properly. His way is simpler and he's willing to bet that most people in this house would prefer his method if they could wrap their heads around it.

Violet's eyes are vacant until she sees Patrick with gold hair and gold skin and gold spandex. He follows her to the attic and tries to pry her hands away from other women's underwear but she snarls at him and drops her clothes to the ground. He's greeted with the sight of her bare skin painted in various hues of blood in the shape of his hands and teeth and the bones he worked hard to make strong when he was small, choking down milk even when it made him gag. He's never really been out the city and when he learned where exactly milk came from on a cow and the location of its human equivalent he put the cap back on the bottle with a horrified look and a vow never to put his mouth near anything remotely connected to a tit until the day he died.

Then he discovered porn and out of curiosity he discovered that the human equivalent, when connected to a flushed body and grasping hands, tastes much better, but he still won't drink milk. It's blobs of fat in a liquid in a glass and that's not natural, although that doesn't even make sense in his own head.

She disappears downstairs and slams into Patrick's chest and starts to sing about how she wants to be dirty and her voice is surprisingly clear and sweet.

It's irrational to be jealous over the affections of a half mad flightless baby bird ghost girl who doesn't love him or herself very much anymore. Even when he's the only one who's ever touched her and the only one she's ever wanted. Patrick's body is a temple devoted to dick and Violet's is devoted to Tate.

He can see a muscle jumping in Patrick's jaw. Even in love he's selfish and likes all the extras that come with revenge. He won't do anything to stop it because he thinks she likes them too.

Patrick pushes her down the stairs and he waits until she stops twitching to jump him from behind. He contemplates breaking his neck but it's thicker than his thigh and spilling his blood over such a trivial thing as his girl's broken spinal cord is gratifying. He's overpowered him more than once and Violet likes to hear the story because it makes her hot to think about just how strong that makes him.

He's sinewy and slight in comparison to Patrick but he wants it and the blood rush to his dick and the adrenaline rush from the crack of Violet's bones is enough to make him almost black out. That's when he knows he'll wake up with insides on his outsides and occasionally between his teeth.

He did it to Violet once, a year after she crawled back into his bed and suddenly decided to banish him again. He carved her body with Charles' rusty scalpels and had her whimpering before he slit her throat. Her insides taste good all the way through, not just in the places he's best acquainted with.

There are cobwebs on the stairs stained red and Violet's body is covered in pumpkin entrails from where they broke her fall and her neck. A line of blood stretches from under his shoe to a wing of the house that has failed to ever pique his interest. His bedroom is a little hazy on ownership but in his head it is still half his. That makes it _theirs_ and that makes him happy.

He scoops her up, scoops her out of the bright orange mush and flicks a seed from her shoulder. He leaves her under the shower head and when she wakes up she'll pull faces at him for turning on the cold, and disappear under blankets until he shows up and volunteers his services.

Ben rarely sees the light of day and he likes it that way, opens up the whole house as his personal battlefield in the perpetual war against Violet's conscience. The baby can be heard wailing at almost any time, day or night, and he's willing to bet Ben is shirking his parental duties in favour of the oblivion he finds in a bottle, or in Hayden. Vivien is no better than Nora, if quieter, more serene. She plays the cello all day every day and stares at walls in between.

Their bedroom is a war bunker, even then. He keeps it stocked with books and cigarettes and when she lets him he treats Violet like a gas mask, never out of reach.

When she sleeps he thinks about waves, not just the ones at the beach but the ones in the air, like they used to teach at Westfield. About how two waves that run perfectly in sync amplify one another, create spots of brightness and darkness in turn. Alone, his blood feels like ice, so maybe the psychic channel had something right because this house has cold spots in every square inch of dusty air. With Violet he feels something akin to body heat and in summer they strip the sheets, open windows. Tate licks salt from the back of her neck and sweat drips from his hair and she makes him woozy.

She wakes up in double time. She looks like a drowned cat but her face is blank and dangerous and he smiles at her serenely because he likes the game where he has to break her before she'll open her mouth or her legs in some semblance of a kiss.

Every time she digs herself out of another grave she comes back a little different, but that's part of the fun. He's always been better with words than with problems but really, his talent is her. He unlocks the doors in her head and breaks down the half hearted barriers she tries and fails to build up in his absence, in between fucks.

On his favourite days she comes back confused and he gets to be the living boy hopped up on behavioural meds and the high he promises is almost three quarters her. Maybe she'll forget why she forgave him for a while and crack him over the head with a paper weight, whisper the name of his favourite partner in crime, watch the slow reveal of vital organs like a dance of seven veils. More than once she's taken his head for a little Biblical role play but it fades away before he wakes, she says. He's not sure if he'd ever want her to prove her claims, but if she wants to play Salome he can duck his head in the bathtub and be her John the Baptist.

Every time he breaks her open and he gets to show off just how gentle or just how rough he can make it. Every time her breathing heightens and her face flushes and she convulses and shakes under him like he's thrown a TV into the bath tub.

On the worst days she resurfaces in her cognitive timeline somewhere in the dopamine starved dark days before she realised that morals don't mean shit when you're dead. It's the closest she's ever come to fading like Nora or the nurses and it makes for a lead weight in his stomach, when he knows she'll be restless and empty and sad. She becomes blind and deaf and dumb even when he snaps her wrist or her finger.

Today her eyes look like flames barely concealed under flickering lids and he thinks that wet underwear is his new favourite thing.

He's always liked the word gooseflesh, likes it even more when it applies to her slender arms and everywhere else. When she shivers it looks too violent not to be half on purpose because in a decade under his tutelage she's learned revenge like an art form. She was almost there to begin with, selfish and cruel and utterly oblivious to her own prowess.

He's killed himself in countless inventive ways in a bid for her forgiveness and it's only made it worse; she knows how easily his confidence crumbles when she sneers at him or looks straight through as if his arm isn't hanging on by a thread and her old bedroom hasn't been painted in a delicate pattern of arterial blood.

She knows how easily he cracks when she pulls the perverted ghost bit, a role reversal of all the times he watched her shower and left her sheets a mystery, not-so-mystery mess. His clothes have been stolen from his back while he sleeps and he almost snapped her neck when he'd been convinced it was Hayden's invisible lips on the inside of his thigh. Her breath in his face had given her away and Beau got scared at the noises.

If he could ever talk to Ben about it he would probably tell Tate that his uncontrollable lust after frail wrists and minuscule waists and long hair stems from stunted sexual maturation. If he'd never died he wonders whether his adult self would have been a parking lot creeper, if he'd ever whisk Violet away in a nondescript black car and break some minor laws, when compared to his real misdeeds.

She's waifish and it makes him feel like a man when he's not. Even angry she's barely scary enough to make him hesitate, and he's got her in a vice like grip, walking her to the bed, lifting her really, smirking when she gasps and he knows that his desperation is good for one thing: friction. His fingers catch in dips between her ribs and in her navel when she nips his lip and kisses under his jaw.

Coherent speech isn't her thing anymore, not with him, but he'll hear her coo at the baby sometimes, and worry his lip until she comes back upstairs and gives no indication that she's slipping down the broody slope. If he'd been alive he'd have married her straight out of high school, a child bride. She'd have as many babies as she wanted, or most likely none at all because she's never been one to want what's easy.

She purrs like he always knew she would, surrendering to a domesticated form of her inner monster. There's the ghost of a frown between her eyebrows but he's willing to make her sweat it out, wait until her hips are jerking and she's started to pull away from his lips or pinch his arm, a silent demand for his clothes on the floor and his skin against hers.

She smells like water without soap, almost like rain, with a trace of pumpkin, and he whispers that he should put her in a pie when her eyes light up and she faux scowls against his cheek. There's fawn hair fanned out on the pillow that's dripping and tangled and she's still shivering.

Her fingernails catch against the skin at his neck as she scrambles with buttons, trying and failing to pull his shirt off, teeth on his earlobe and he's infinitely distracted as he pulls away to pull it over his head. The dull scrape is back again, against his chest, raising goosebumps and welts. She grins and swipes her tongue over them, hands travelling lower to brush against the edge of his pants, slow, eyes locked on his, fighting a smirk.

His stomach's in knots, hands clenching and unclenching, but he's got a feeling that she'd snap at him if he touched her, intuition even when his head's foggy and falling down and he can almost hear the alignment of her teeth as she smiles. A smile is dangerous and usually means there's a gun on the dresser. But he's a psycopath and gifted with drawing her attention.

One thumb over one rosebud nipple that he always said was cute or nice or something equally condescending before she used to smack him on the head, and gasp when he sucked blooms of purple and red into her skin where her breast met her ribs.

The other hand trailing down her side, across her thighs, marked and lined and scarred and pretty, down between slick folds in a search for self assertion.

Her breath comes quicker and her grip goes slack on his shoulders when he drags one finger across her clit.

Her bottom lip is between his and he swallows her breath and kisses behind her ear like he used to fantasise about in Doctor Harmon's office. He's more than once thought about doing it over a desk or against a book shelf because clichés are clichéd for a reason.

Sometimes he forgets that she comes back as virginal and pure as is possible to be and takes it too fast, fumbling and slick and ready set go, blood on the sheets and sobs in his ear and a face burning in shame because she has to learn it all over again; he forgets that she needs help to jog muscle memory.

Her mind is shattered and he knows it but he's saying nothing because death means variety, and variety is the spice of life; he doesn't really care if she's happy or not anymore because she herself wouldn't know the difference. All she knows is wet sounds and moans and his long fingers and the cool surface of a silver ring that he doesn't always take off.

She knows how to make him bleed and beg but not why, and she knows how it makes her feel but not how it started, sometimes.

Her hips are bucking under him and her cheeks are stained red, she's squirming but he doesn't have to open his eyes or listen to her whines to know she's closer and closer and closer.

Her back arches and her eyes go wide and start to roll like some sort of seizure and she's contracting around his fingers, writhing and wriggling to have his fingers anywhere but her clit while her nerves frazzle and it hurts and it burns.

When her breathing slows and she presses a kiss to his jaw he grabs her by the hips, blood rushing, pulse racing, pupils wide and desperate.

She's levelled out, back to the land of the almost alive and for once half concerned about how hard his dick looks and how awful that must be for poor little Tate. She reaches across to the dresser, pulls a pack of cigarettes that he thought was a knife when he knocks it out of her hand and she laughs in his face.

Real laughter, the old kind, before it turned to manic giggles that were almost always for show.

He's not laughing, not now, not when he's got her hips under his palms and her eyes locked on his and he's missed the times when she can be responsive and normal and sane. She's pretending to be restless and he's growling in her ear and telling her to cut the shit. That's when she flushes and her eyes go dark because he's taken the bait and he'll give her what she wants so far as it lines up with what he has in mind.

She wriggles out from under him, slapping his arm and rolling to the side to sit facing the wall. It shows off the dimples at the base of her back and the bones in her spine that look as straight and as whole as they ever did. Her fingers are quick through her hair, some semblance of brushing out the snarls made by stagnant water that hasn't been clean since the last owners moved. Tate thinks it's something to do with the house itself, rather than something as simple as plumbing. Cloudy water is nothing compared to roaches or something else equally low budget horror movie, but it would be nice to get rid of the dust without adding an extra layer on top.

He watches, propped up on one elbow like the first time ever, before she knew she'd missed the necrophilia train by a matter of hours. After he gave her the suicide speech that did its job a thousand times better than the pamphlets they gave him at school, stopped her waking up from dreams of fitting and falling and bleeding.

When she slit her throat with a razor in the bathroom the first time he jumped to her rescue, slipped in a menacing line and a disappearing act that had her doubting her sanity, not her mortality.

She doesn't comprehend the lengths he went to to keep her safe. He thinks that's why she fails to be grateful. Not because she doesn't love him, because she does. She hates herself for it but she does. That's why when she turns to face him he senses a change and it's game on because the house is in her head, in the way she presses one hand to his chest and sucks on his earlobe and places one knee on either side of his hips.

Her fingernails dig into his chin while she turns his head and whispers in his ear and scrapes cold hands against his scalp. The tips of his fingers trace her shoulderblades, her spine, her ribs, all the sharp edges that jut out against pale skin. He likes the skin on her chest, so thin and translucent that he can see every bright blue vein, because it's been a while since she's shown her skin to the sun. He likes it because when her nipples pebble and she whimpers the blue gets brighter - he can see the blood rushing to places that make her squirm. Sometimes it gets too much and she slaps his hand away but really it's code for keep going.

When she sits back and slips a hand down his chest and around his dick he fights a gasp because she shouldn't surprise him, not anymore. He likes to think that she's good at it because she knows him, because they're _sur la même longeur d'onde, _but really it's because he's painstaking and patient in his teachings. She's the only chance he'll ever get to feel something other than his own hand, which has never been enough. Not since the goth girl behind the bleachers who gathered up black tulle skirts with a nervous smile that didn't look right with painted black lips. Not since she whimpered and bled and he got his and left her crying over lost innocence that wasn't as deviant as she hoped it would be, just wholly unclean.

Violet's first time was different from all the other women he's forced himself on, and that makes the guilt disappear in a haze of humid air and the smell of sex that won't come out of the sheets. He counts that as his first time because his mental facilities were passable, if not better.

The way she's staring at it makes something shift in his stomach, threatening a blush, because he was raised by Constance and a respectable girl should never look that interested in boy parts.

When she slinks down over it he tries and fails not to watch: he always forgets just how good it feels, just how much willpower he needs.

Her hair's long enough that it brushes his skin and tickles and drips when he twirls strands around his fingers.

She moves and he closes his eyes, braces for impact, caught up in the sound and the heat in his blood. Her hands are on his chest, fingers opening and closing around a pocket of air she squeezes out of her fists and she looks a little like a stretching cat. From there his thoughts are stepping stones to the word pussy and he remembers all the times he whispered in her ear words that she was ashamed to hear.

Her tongue makes circles on his shoulder and when she's folded over him he takes the opportunity to switch places, back in the place he belongs, the place he doesn't want to leave.

He can feel her tilt her hips and arch her back so her chest is against his. She's sensitive because the nerves are closer together, he thinks. Smaller area. It does things to her, things he can feel against his dick, ripples to the tidal wave of an orgasm.

She's making sounds in his ear, quiet and keening and breathless. He's close, water hugging the rim of a cup that's about to overflow, when she stretches her arms above her head, under the pillow, turns her face and shivers, hips jerking, eyes wide, knife flashing.

When he wakes the sheets are red and his chest feels tender. There's a rib that looks like his on his pillow. He wonders what she does with all the heads.


End file.
